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I recently learned that there is an "Other" type of workout available on the Apple Watch. If you set this to "Open", you've basically got the watch recording everything you're doing. It's great for limited use stuff like a busy morning routine — going downstairs, making the coffee, letting the dogs outside, going into the basement to get the dehumidifier pail, coming back upstairs to dump it, then going back downstairs to place the empty pail back in the machine, then back upstairs to the main floor... you get the idea.

One runs into problems when the activity is left to record once all that movement is done. This morning, I engaged the "Open/Other" activity to do a bunch of things downstairs before returning to work, and failed to shut it off — it ran the entire time I was taking a training course — for over an hour. After the course, I went outside to start my morning exercise, and saw my activity ring had 82 minutes recorded to it. Oops.

Here's what I did to resolve it, though be warned: You'll lose all of the data for the "bogus" workout. So if you actually exercised for 10 minutes and then sat on your behind for 60, you'll lose credit for all 70 — the good 10 minutes plus the rest. If you're okay with that, follow these steps. If you're not, read through and maybe you can figure out a better way to do business.

• I opened the Activity app on my phone.
• The History panel is selected by default, and the view is the current day. I scrolled down to the Workouts list and found two actual workouts and the bogus one.
• I opened the bogus workout and noted the time range.
• Then I went back to the list of today's workouts and deleted the bogus workout. (Yes, I lost credit for the actual workout part, but I figured that was a small price to pay.) The move ring data reset immediately, but the activity ring data did not.
• Then I opened the Health App.
• On the Health Data panel, I tapped on the large orange Activity icon at top left.
• I scrolled down the list of data to and tapped on Exercise Minutes.
• I tapped on Show All Data.
• I tapped on the row with the current date.
• Every minute that has recorded data shows a "1", followed by the time down to the minute. These rows are sorted in descending order, such that the most recent minute is at the top. For each row in the time range I noted earlier, I swiped left to expose a delete button, and tapped the delete button.
• After clearing out each of the entries, I backed out two or three times to the Exercise Minutes panel to ensure the data saved.
• The activity ring data on my watch reset.

I'm not saying this is necessarily the BEST way to handle this. I'm simply sharing what I did to get my data back in line with my actual activity, albeit I did it at the cost of the 10 actual minutes of workout data in my "70-minute workout."

Perhaps I could have done more in the Health app to whack the calories in the Exercise Minutes I deleted. I simply don't know. But what I did got me far closer to actual effort than leaving it be.